Billions in handouts to already rich corporations

That's the jist of what Joe Conason says the Medicare bill, passed in the Senate today, will do:

As the Washington Post reports today, however, the Medicare bill that is about to become law "would steer at least $125 billion over the next decade in extra assistance to the health care industry and U.S. businesses."

[snip]

Lobbyists for the "efficient" private insurers demanded and won a new rule that will give them the same rates paid by traditional, fee-for-service Medicare -- plus an additional $12 billion slush fund for the private programs, designed to "persuade" them to do business in places where they have already begun to abandon their clients. (The success of the healthcare lobby no doubt is connected to its political generosity. Nearly two dozen of the Bush Pioneers, fat cats who have bundled more than $100,000 for the president's campaign, are connected with the industry.) Health economist Marilyn Moon finds these fat payoffs "very ironic," since, as she explains, "To increase participation in private plans, we are going to overpay them for the foreseeable future."

Well isn't that just dandy?